Recently, the public has become increasingly concerned with disease and its transmission, and as such, there is an increased awareness of the importance of cleansing and hygiene in general. For example, with respect to the transmission of E. coli in the food services industry, the rhinovirus in elementary schools, and nosocomial diseases within healthcare facilities, numerous studies have cited hand hygiene as an effective measure to guard against disease transmission. Moreover, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has set forth that hand washing and sanitizing is the single most important factor in the prevention of disease and the spread of infection. In response, the health care industry, the food services industry, and the hotel and travel industries have been forced to examine their protocols and procedures to ensure that their personnel are adopting hand cleansing habits that are efficacious in the prevention of disease transmission.
In order to minimize the chance of the transmission of bacteria or viruses by hand washing, full compliance with hand washing hygiene standards must be observed, as the failure of one individual to properly sanitize his or her hands can negate the efforts of others who come in contact with such individual. Thus, to ensure that full compliance occurs, many industries have trained individuals who are charged with overseeing compliance with hygiene standards. Unfortunately, individuals overseeing compliance with hygiene standards typically have other responsibilities, which often interfere with their ability to effectively monitor hygiene compliance. To overcome this, automated systems have been developed that monitor the usage habits of soap dispensers as an aid in the determination of whether compliance with hygiene protocols is being achieved. However, due to the relatively complex nature of these systems, trained individuals are generally needed to administrate and maintain the systems. Additionally, because individuals responsible for overseeing the operation of the compliance monitoring systems are often subject to high turnover, frequent retraining is necessitated, which requires substantial time and expense.
In addition, compliance monitoring systems often utilize wired or wireless computer networks with which to communicate the hygiene data collected from the dispenser to a central computer database. However, integrating the computer network with a plurality of dispensers that may be distributed throughout many rooms and floors of a building results in a highly complex system, which is undesirable. Furthermore, unless the communication network associated with each dispenser was installed at the time of construction of the building or structure maintaining the dispensers, retrofitting a wired computer network for communication to each dispenser is likely cost prohibitive. And while wireless communication networks may be utilized in cases where the dispensers have already been installed, the power requirements needed to power a wireless network transceiver at each dispenser that is capable of transmitting hygiene compliance data to a centrally-located computer system and database would necessitate access to wired power sources, which may be logistically prohibitive.
While other hygiene compliance data collection systems that are easier to install and administrate are available, they utilize remote data logging devices that are not capable of reading data collected from a dispenser at a distance outside of the room where the dispenser is located. That is, such systems require that the data logging device be brought into close proximity of the dispenser before hygiene compliance data can be transferred thereto, which is undesirable when data from a large number of dispensers is being collected. Furthermore, bringing the data logging device in close proximity to the dispenser can be a burden in isolation wards and other areas that require limited patient contact and/or the wearing of a gown and gloves to enter the area. Moreover, such hygiene compliance monitors generally maintain a memory of insufficient size that is overrun when too many hygiene events are recorded and stored.
Thus, current hygiene compliance monitoring systems typically do not offer robust data collection features and are generally too complex to install, administrate, and maintain to be utilized on a large scale in environments where the monitoring and assessment of compliance with hygiene standards is of critical importance and benefit to prevent disease transmission.
Therefore, there is a need for a user-friendly hygiene compliance monitoring system for assessing compliance with predetermined hygiene protocols. In addition, there is a need for a hygiene compliance monitoring system to monitor the use of soap and sanitizer dispensers that collect hygiene usage data in time segments or grouping intervals to ensure that a memory unit maintained thereby is not overrun. Furthermore, there is a need for a hygiene compliance monitoring system that utilizes a portable data acquisition unit that wirelessly retrieves collected hygiene compliance data from a data collection unit associated with a dispenser. There is also a need for a hygiene compliance monitoring system that uses a removable portable memory unit to simplify the transfer of data from the system.